Other presidential candidates have ‘fake followers’ too.
By Mario Alvaro Limos, esquiremag.ph
Nearly half of presidential candidate Bongbong Marcos’ Twitter followers are “fake,” according to data from analytics tool SparkToro.
Facebook user Marvin Terce posted screenshots from SparkToro’s Fake Followers Audit tool, where people can input the social media pages of anyone for auditing.
Based on Terce’s audit results, 47.4 percent of the 917,000 followers during the time the audit was run on Marcos’ Twitter account were “fake.”
SparkToro defines “fake followers” as “accounts that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets either because they’re spam, bots, propaganda, etc. or because they’re no longer active on Twitter.”
Many Twitter Accounts Have Fake Followers
According to SpakToro, as much as 30 percent of followers on Twitter are fake.
“In our research, 5 percent to 30 percent of followers are fake—they’re bots, spam accounts, inactive users, propaganda, or other non-engaged/non-real users. If you rely on follower count as a measure of potential influence and reach, you could be vastly overestimating an account.”
For every audit request, SparkToro takes a sample of 2,000 random followers for any given account and runs diagnostics that correlate with fake followers’ behavior or activity.
But it was not only Marcos who had “fake followers” on Twitter.
According to a Rappler report, the Twitter account of Ping Lacson (@iampinglacson) had 37.5 percent of his 43,997 followers considered fake; Manny Pacquiao (@mannypacquiao) with 32.6% of his 2,682,801 followers considered fake; and Leni Robredo (@lenirobredo) with 13.4% of her 600,134 followers considered fake.